Computational politics are the analytical tools used to profile at the individual level. It is asymmetrical warfare. ‘They’ have a machine gun and ‘you’ have nothing, not even the awareness of all the battles you lose.

• Broke: Survey questions, supplemented by a layer of “latent data” that gave correlational guidance at the group level but not precise individual targeting
• Woke: User generated, persistent data collection. The always-on trail of harvestable imprints

Twitter is one supply line of the attack

Twitter narrowly defines ‘you’ and ‘your’ attributes including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. These are the deepest parts of a person’s identity

As the fragmenting of groups is now unrecoverable, elections will be fought more aggressively at the margins of extreme polarization and low turnout.

1. The quantity and quality of persistent surveillance extracted from online conversations, likes, retweets, comments, your language, sentiment, empathy all correlated, political engagement, employment, home address, cell phone records, search history, purchases, financial interaction and all those people on your periphery, has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount and type of data available to large organizations that can afford the access
2. Campaign sciences have aborted the philosophy of the ‘rational human’ and adopted a ‘realistic model’ of human behavior allows for enhanced, network–based social engineering
3. Twitter enables real time, quickly iterated messaging and methods
4. Data, tools and techniques that comprise these methods require access to proprietary, expensive data
5. Twitter has a significant role in information sharing among politicians, journalists and citizens
6. Twitter can make it easier or harder for political campaigns to acquire user information, or may decide to package and sell data to campaigns in ways that differentially empower the campaigns
7. Twitter could decide to use its own store of big data to model voters and to target voters of a candidate favorable to the economic interests of Twitter itself

There is a campaign underway to demobilize, ridicule and marginalize the anti-war left. It cloaks itself in the popular causes of #resistance hashtags to allow it to operate unobstructed. It uses a large syndicate of ‘conservatives’, ‘liberals’, conveniently forgiven neocons who got us into wars on a lie, #AntiTrump, pundits, bots and astroturfing as an endless positive feedback loop.

The primary target of the Twitter attack is Bernie Sanders. I’m not commenting on his views, right or wrong, only that he has the ‘size’ of the left.

Let’s agree on these definitions:

• Sockpuppet: False identities used to praise, support or defend a person or organization
• Bot: Fake twitter identity. A program that autonomously tweets, retweets, likes, follows, unfollows
• Spambot: Bots used by ‘click-farms’ in the service of advertisers to drive traffic to a website
• Astroturfing: Masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear grassroots

Botnets, bots and sockpuppet are force multipliers. They are used to:

• Broadcast misinformation
• Make a hashtag trend
• Promote a story, have it detected by Google and promoted to the top of the results page for a query
• Amplify messages, feign popular support, shape discussion and manipulate public debate
• Jam the opposing campaigns twitter feed, bombard accounts in an attempt to get them suspended

There is no action on social media that does not have a target. Everything is a campaign. 

Q: How do you measure the success of a campaign?
A: By the amount of diffusion and iterations that people create from the kernels that are planted

First, let’s look at events offline and how it corresponds with online actions (none of this should infer that I’m a Republican apologist, a ‘conservative’, or anything ‘alt’. For full disclosure I am a big-time Democrat)

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives in 2018 mid-term, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as half of the new Democratic members of Congress.

The Intel and war industry apparatus has chosen the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle.

Online

This is the account of Democratic fanfic publisher Shareblue

Sally Albright is an inane tweeter

In the process of troubleshooting, she tweeted a screenshot of the Buffer browser extension. The screenshot clearly shows dozens of Twitter account avatars signed in to the service. Buffer allows for creating groups of different accounts in order to schedule tweets (or retweets) for different purposes or communities. At the time of the screenshot, Sally had 24 accounts in a group called “Weird Twitter”, 25 in “Hillary”,6 in “Group 1”, and 14 in “Tier 2”.

In the above screenshot, avatars of three dozen accounts are clearly visible. Six of the avatars were easily recognizable and matched photos from accounts that commonly retweeted Sally. All of these accounts were tweeting links to Shareblue.com multiple times per day in late January, 2018.

The screenshot of account avatars, the Shareblue articles shared via Buffer, and the fact that the official @Shareblue account also uses Buffer, offer circumstantial evidence that Sally’s sockpuppet army is either working with or adjacent to Shareblue.

• Sally Albrightretweeted herself 30939 times from 63 unique sockpuppet accounts. In the first six weeks of 2018, she managed to retweet herself an average of 559 times per day.

99% of the posts made by the sockpuppet accounts were automated retweets using Buffer. From Jan 15, 2018 to February 15, 2018

• Total number of retweets was 132773, for an average of 4200 per day
• The number of retweets frequently reached over 6000 per day and went up to a maximum of just shy of 8000 retweets per day

This is all done in-house with a single person using software that costs about $200 per month

Twitter knows about every single action that occurs on its platform.